1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the fields of multimedia and communications and, more specifically, to a programmable multimedia controller for home, commercial, professional audio or video, broadcast or film studio, security, automation or other use which is capable of interfacing with, controlling and managing a wide variety of audio, video, telecommunications, data communications and other devices.
2. Background Information
Many advanced telephony services developed within the past 25 years or so, including two-party video calls, videoconferencing and voicemail, originally required customers to acquire special equipment (e.g., a videoconferencing system, a voicemail system attached to a PBX, etc.) and the requisite network bandwidth to support the services. In the case of voicemail, telecommunications carriers eventually began to offer that service to residential and wireless subscribers by provisioning their central offices with large systems that could support tens of thousands of subscribers. Telecommunications carriers, prepaid calling card companies and others profited by deploying voicemail services because subscribers tend to make many additional calls and incur substantial minutes of use in connection with voicemail. Text messaging also emerged as a profitable offering which could be easily deployed by wireless carriers and, accordingly, became widely available.
However, video calls and videoconferencing have not received similar treatment in the marketplace. A major reason for this difference is that video calls and videoconferencing have historically required special, often expensive, equipment on the premises of each subscriber. That is, each subscriber must have a video camera, a microphone, a display, some type of controller and appropriate bandwidth to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Due to the unwillingness of most non-business subscribers to pay the significant costs associated with the necessary equipment, especially in light of expected limited use, video calling and videoconferencing did not historically achieve the broad-based adoption and usage of voicemail.
More recently, some companies have introduced internet-based services which allow persons to make video calls or hold videoconferences using the Internet as opposed to the PSTN. The iChat® service offered by Apple Computer, Inc. and Instant Messenger with video by AOL are two examples of such a service. While those services generally perform well, they do require a subscriber to have certain computer hardware and software, as well as experience using a computer, in order to function. More importantly, those services are typically based on a particular technology claimed as proprietary by a vendor and not on an open industry standard. The absence of open standards creates barriers of incompatibility between competing vendors' offerings, which tends to limit adoption and usage.